Abstract: How does the brain encode spatial structure? One way is through hippocampal neurons called place cells, which become associated to convex regions of space known as their receptive fields: each place cell fires at a high rate precisely when the animal is in the receptive field. The firing patterns of multiple place cells form what is known as a convex neural code. How can we tell when a neural code is convex? To address this question, Giusti and Itskov identified a local obstruction, defined via the topology of a code's simplicial complex, and proved that convex neural codes have no local obstructions. Curto et al. proved the converse for all neural codes on at most four neurons. Via a counterexample on five neurons, we show that this converse is false in general. Additionally, we classify all codes on five neurons with no local obstructions. This classification is enabled by our enumeration of connected simplicial complexes on 5 vertices up to isomorphism. Finally, we examine how local obstructions are related to maximal codewords (maximal sets of neurons that co-fire). Curto et al. proved that a code has no local obstructions if and only if it contains certain "mandatory" intersections of maximal codewords. We give a new criterion for an intersection of maximal codewords to be non-mandatory, and prove that it classifies all such non-mandatory codewords for codes on up to 5 neurons.
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Cited in
(33)- On open and closed convex codes
- Morphisms of Neural Codes
- Oriented matroids and combinatorial neural codes
- Neural codes, decidability, and a new local obstruction to convexity
- Canonical forms of neural ideals
- What makes a neural code convex?
- Open, closed, and non-degenerate embedding dimensions of neural codes
- What can topology tell us about the neural code?
- Planar Convex Codes are Decidable
- Homomorphisms preserving neural ideals
- Every binary code can be realized by convex sets
- Hyperplane Neural Codes and the Polar Complex
- Non-monotonicity of closed convexity in neural codes
- Polarization of neural rings
- Strongly maximal intersection-complete neural codes on grids are convex
- Nondegenerate Neural Codes and Obstructions to Closed-Convexity
- Gröbner bases of convex neural code ideals (research)
- Neural ring homomorphisms and maps between neural codes
- Wheels: a new criterion for non-convexity of neural codes
- Neural codes with three maximal codewords: convexity and minimal embedding dimension
- Periodic neural codes and sound localization in barn owls
- Realizing convex codes with axis-parallel boxes
- Signless normalized Laplacian for hypergraphs
- Embedding dimension phenomena in intersection complete codes
- Minimal embedding dimensions of connected neural codes
- Classification of open and closed convex codes on five neurons
- Neural codes and the factor complex
- Neural ideals and stimulus space visualization
- Sunflowers of convex open sets
- The combinatorial code and the graph rules of dale networks
- Algebraic signatures of convex and non-convex codes
- Sparse neural codes and convexity
- Gröbner bases of neural ideals
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